(dis)junctions 2014- April 11+12 - Postcolonial Trauma
The field of trauma studies has recently faced criticism for privileging Eurocentric, Western ideas of trauma and recovery. This is especially true when considering historical and cultural trauma. Most of the current scholarship revolves around events like the Holocaust and 9/11 and often neglects or obscures other traumatic events that specifically affect people of color such as slavery, internment camps, Indigenous boarding/residential schools, and Central and South American dictatorships. In fact, Stef Craps asserts in his recent publication, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds, that most scholars "marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures, they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, they often favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and they generally disregard the connection between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas." Therefore, this panel invites papers that critically engage with non-Western and minority representations of trauma in ways that challenge and expand the field of trauma studies. Papers will hopefully address one or more of the points outlined by Craps provided above, but do not necessarily have to.
The theme of 21st annual (dis)junctions conference, hosted by UC Riverside, is "irreverent readings," featuring keynote speakers Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) and Constance Penley (UC Santa Barbara). Abstracts of 250 to 300 words should be submitted via the form at www.disjunctions2014.org by February 10th, 2014.